TRTR(I.3) Resource Addition - I'll Be Damned

[Mark Kohut]

>From the wikipedia article on Fort. Sound like any writer we are reading? 
Jerome Clark writes that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of 
human beings' – especially scientists' – claims to ultimate knowledge".[2] Clark 
describes Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, 
penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".[3]
 
His papers are at the New York Public Library. Convince me that neither Gaddis 
nor Pynchon dipped into him/them?
O, Yes as the wiki article sez: a big believer that 'everything is 
connected'...lots we had/have never connected....Coincidence? I doubt that, he 
would say.
 
 



----- Original Message ----
From: Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, April 27, 2011 1:17:26 PM
Subject: TRTR(I.3) Resource Addition - I'll Be Damned

The Book of the Damned, by Charles Fort, is mentioned and quoted in
Chapter 3 ("By the damned, I mean the excluded"/"By prostitution, I
seem to mean usefulness"/"maybe we're fished for"):

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22472/22472-h/22472-h.htm

From Fort:

By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something
else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a
reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we
mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do
not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do
merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is
nothing with which to merge.

That, though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable
that the universal can be localized: but that high approximations
there may be, and that these approximate successes may be translated
out of Intermediateness into Realness—quite as, in a relative sense,
the industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness,
or out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines
which seem, when set up in factories, to have more of Realness than
they had when only imagined.

That all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization,
harmony, consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real.

So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like
a purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call
Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but
expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a
real existence.

Our acceptance is that Science, though usually thought of so
specifically, or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a
prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this
one spirit animating all Intermediateness: that, if Science could
absolutely exclude all data but its own present data, or that which is
assimilable with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real
system, with positively definite outlines—it would be real.

Its seeming approximation to consistency, stability,
system—positiveness or realness—is sustained by damning the
irreconcilable or the unassimilable—

All would be well.

All would be heavenly—

If the damned would only stay damned.